Accelerated X Laptop Display Server v4.1

The Accelerated X servers are traditionally excellent products on the desktop—I've been using them on desktop BSD/OS and Linux boxes for a long time—providing both adequate stability and excellent speed relative to the freeware efforts.

Manufacturer: Xi Graphics

Phone: +1 303 298 7478

Email: info@xig.com

URL: http://www.xig.com/

Price: $199 US

Reviewer: Michael Scott Shappe

Those of you who read my review of the Fujitsu 420D laptop
know that one of my few complaints with it was that they chose to
use the NeoMagic video chip—a chip which XFree86 cannot support
because NeoMagic has chosen to keep their programming
specifications proprietary. As a result, I have been trapped in
sixteen-color VGA limbo for quite some time. This has not been a
major hardship, since my primary application is word processing
(see my review of WordPerfect 7 for Linux next month), but it's
annoying, nonetheless.

The only X server available for Linux at the moment that does
support the NeoMagic chipset (among many other chipsets) is Xi
Graphics' Accelerated X Laptop Server. The Accelerated X servers
are traditionally excellent products on the desktop—I've been
using them on desktop BSD/OS and Linux boxes for a long
time—providing both adequate stability and excellent speed
relative to the freeware efforts. (None of which means that Xfree86
is a slouch either in speed or stability; as free products go, XF86
is excellent. It's just that Accelerated-X is usually somewhat
better.)

The laptop edition of the latest version, 4.1, appears to be
no exception to this track record. Unfortunately, it appears to
carry over a few of the warts of past versions as well and
introduces one new one which I find extremely annoying.

Good News First

The good news is that Accelerated X delivers what it
advertises: a faster X server, loaded with the most recent
extension standards, with a very wide range of supported hardware.
Its modular architecture means that the server software will not
become obsolete with innovations in display technology—all it'll
need is a new module. New and updated display card modules will be
available for free from Xi Graphics' web server. Several other
features, including the X server extensions (such as PEX) and the
font-rendering engines, are also modularized, meaning that these
can also be updated or extended without having to upgrade the
server.

Particularly pleasing to me, of course, is that the server
supports the NeoMagic 2093, providing 24-bit color at 640x480
resolution, 16-bit color at 800x600 and 256 color at 1024x768 on an
external monitor. According to the documentation, it also supports
a hot key to switch in real time between the LCD panel and an
external monitor. Chips with more video memory are supported with
more colors and higher resolutions with the maximum resolution
theoretically possible being 1900x1440, although no currently
available video chipset for a laptop has that much memory.

Presumably, it would provide 1024x768 on a larger LCD panel,
if available; as it is, 800x600 is the maximum resolution supported
on my laptop's panel.

Installation is a straightforward affair—become a superuser,
mount the CD, change directories to the mount point, and type
./Install. If you have an older version of
Accelerated X installed, the installer will move it out of the way
before proceeding. You get a choice of which packages you wish to
install, and then the installer just does its work.

The Xsetup program has two modes. The text-based version
should be familiar to anyone who has ever installed any version of
Accelerated X, and there is now a fully graphical version that, if
possible, starts up a minimally-configured X server at 640x480 and
allows point-and-click configuration. The first time I ran Xsetup,
I got the text version by default; after that, I always got the
graphical version unless I asked for the text version. The
graphical version has a few more options than the text version,
leading me to believe Xi Graphics feels that the text version is to
be used to get the basics set up and after that you should be far
enough along to use the graphical version.

The improvement in speed over XFree86's VGA16 server was
immediately noticeable, even with the greater color-depth (16-bit
instead of 4-bit). Window manager menu performance was snappier, as
was the minimizing and maximizing of windows. WordPerfect, which
previously had shown some lag when typing (a lag which I had
already suspected to be a combination of both a non-optimized
server and a slower font-server) behaved much better, and scaled
fonts seemed sharper.

Now the Bad News

Before I start on the bad news, I want to make a point.
There's probably going to be more complaining here than there was
complimenting above. Don't confuse quantity and quality. This
product does deliver on its main promise: a better, faster,
stronger X server that isn't free but won't bankrupt you.

For all of that, there are a number of problems, ranging from
mere warts to outright bugs, that I, for one, do not expect in a
product as mature as this one. Many of these complaints seem to
boil down to Xi Graphics not completely thinking through the “user
experience” on a laptop.

Installation is, as I said, fairly straightforward.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell from the documentation, if you
have any brand of X Server installed other than an older version of
Accelerated X, it will install over it, rather than moving it out
of the way. This isn't entirely a bad thing, particularly if you've
installed lots of other packages, but it could lead to
complications. Newer versions of Xfree86 ship shared libraries with
version 6.3 to match the X release (X11R6.3). Accelerated X, while
implementing X11R6.3, leaves the shared library revision at 6.1.
With both in place, the higher numbers will be used by the dynamic
loader, and the mismatch between libraries and server could lead to
strange results. This problem is documented, as is the
workaround.

The other installation and set-up problem is that the
graphical Xsetup frequently crashes after you've asked it to test
out a configuration, leaving you to start the whole thing over
again. Worse, it won't let you save after certain changes without
testing it first. Since there are other ways to configure things,
and since it doesn't happen every time, this is not a show-stopper,
but it's hard to excuse.

Documentation, generally, is a problem. The Accelerated X
Laptop Server is billed as a separate product, sold separately from
the Desktop Server with an entirely separate license. Yet, at least
my review copy shipped with a generic manual that answers few
laptop-specific questions. In particular, neither the manual nor
the Xsetup program makes any effort to point out that it doesn't
much matter which monitor you select unless your laptop has an
external monitor feed and you're planning to use it. There is no
separate menu item for “LCD Panel”, nor any mention of even the
possibility.

On a related note, Xi Graphics does not seem to have taken
into account the keyboard provided with most laptops. The standard
hot keys for selecting among several possible resolutions
(ctrl-alt-+ [+ on the numeric pad] and
ctrl-alt-- [- on the numeric pad]) are almost
impossible on most laptops, and there's no way to remap those
functions to other keys.

Then there is the price disparity. The Laptop Server is, as
far as I can tell, the exact same program as the desktop server,
shipped with different video drivers. That's fine—as a programmer,
I'm all for code reuse and modular architecture. But the laptop
server is nearly twice the price of the desktop edition and comes
with not just different but fewer drivers.

Finally, there is a major wart in the released version, which
may not be a bug in the X Server but should at least be documented,
that requires more than common knowledge to work around. On some
laptops (mine included), if you start up in any “text” screen
mode (such as the default 80x25) and then start an X Server in a
resolution higher than 640x480, the resulting display area is
offset by an inch, leaving a blank space to the left of the display
and leaving the rightmost inch of the display unavailable (this is
true of XFree86 as well). There is now a patch that solves part of
the problem, but I don't think the product should have been
released with this very visible problem.

The workaround for this problem requires quite a bit of
tweaking of configuration files usually left untouched. The details
are arguably beyond the scope of a review, but may prove useful to
people who have bumped into the problem (both with this product and
with XFree86) and became frustrated. They appear in the sidebar
(Some Hints) and also on my “Linux on Lifebook” web page at
http://www.publiccom.com/web/mikey/lifebooklinux.html.

That said, I discovered an updated NeoMagic driver on the Xi
Graphics FTP site (ftp://ftp.xig.com/) which, when applied, solves
part, but not all of the problem. With the patch applied, I can now
start up in text mode and then start the X server and everything
works perfectly. However, virtual consoles still don't work
right—switching results in a blank screen—and the text mode is
not restored after the X server terminates.

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